Balancing your company’s needs with respect to profitability, productivity, and scalability are both paramount and challenging, especially if your business is a startup. There will always be a two-road situation where you will be put in a position to pick one — whether to develop the software by yourselves or buy it. Well, let me make it simple for you. Both of these actions have their own pros and cons and it is entirely up to you to compromise a few parameters and jump to a conclusion.
When to buy off-the-shelf software?
Buying software is quite useful for small-scale startups when technology dependency is not tightly coupled. When you don’t need to worry about the dynamic changes of the business and if it’s just like another utility for the span of 5+ years, buying is a great idea. But let’s also discuss a few other circumstances.
Budget limitations
Building new software and maintaining them, costs more than buying the production ready software. Canned solutions are cheaper, than building on your own, and therefore can make much more financial sense for a company with a smaller budget.
Lack of technical proficiency
If you don’t have an engineering team to construct software in the first place, hiring them again and crafting software will cost you a lot, if you need a quality outcome. So, it would be wise to pass on the opportunity — buy it, until you have such a team in place.
Time constraints
Time is a crucial factor for all businesses. You need to validate whether you have a sufficient time window for creating proprietary software. If not, preferring tailor made software is not a good idea, considering the design, development, and the maintenance time period. Businesses that do not have this time available should not immediately pursue it.
Open source
If the tool or software that you’re looking for is already in the open source market, then it will be very cost efficient to buy it, if there is a licensing fee. Open source software is great, handy, and can be tailored or customized according to your business needs; although, you cannot sell them though. If productivity alone matters for the new software, using the open source product will really benefit you.
Not reinventing the wheel
If your business case software is already production ready somewhere else, reinventing the wheel again is a waste of time and money. If you have a common business, like a restaurant, there are generally canned software solutions available that are already proven to be effective for your organization’s purpose. Buying and using them is far more effective than tailoring it yourself.
Business case and competition
In the case of your business being a retail furniture store, building amazing technology would unlikely be a factor that sets you apart from your competition. Recognizing the actual needs of your business case is also important before spending money and effort on custom software.
When to build it yourself?
Building software will cost you time and money. All we need to do is to decide whether it is worth it or not. Let’s discuss this in detail.
Not meeting your expectations
Even if there is canned software available for purchasing, if you strongly feel that those are not meeting your needs, you will be pushed to the only option of creating it yourself. Try customizing open source software first — if any. If your business has specialized needs, custom software may be better qualified to meet them.
Not blending with existing system
If you already have a system in place, you need to ensure whether or not the new system or software can work with it or take over from where the existing system left — it can be the database transition, architecture blending, etc. If the two programs do not communicate effectively, they may hinder your efficiency. If you build your own software, you can integrate with a wider set of APIs from different software and data partners.
More productivity
When you have enough money to invest and your focus is completely on the productivity aspect, building your custom software can aid your team to be flexible and work smarter and faster, because you clearly know what you want. Training people in canned software will cost more time and there is also the issue of human error. You can create one comprehensive technology platform as opposed to using multiple different programs. An integrated platform can yield major efficiency gains since all the data is in one place and users do not have to switch between different websites as part of their workflow.
Competitive advantage
When you rely on the same canned software as your rival does, it is more difficult to outperform them (outperforming doesn’t depend entirely on this, but it will create an impact). By designing your own software that is ideally suited for your specific business operations, you can garner a competitive advantage relative to your competitors. That advantage grows as you invest more heavily in your proprietary systems.
As mentioned, deciding whether to buy the software or tailoring it is entirely up to you. At the end of the day, you’re looking for software to help grow your business, so the goal should be measurable ROI. Focus on the ROI and it will help you in narrowing things down to a conclusion.
About the author
Hari Vignesh Jayapalan is a Google Certified Android app developer, IDF Certified UI & UX Professional, street magician, fitness freak, technology enthusiast, and wannabe entrepreneur. He can be found on Twitter @HariofSpades.